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The Fighting TTLGers present: Arma 3 (a TTLG Coop Saturdays spin-off)

As we've now got a group of people playing Arma 3 semi-regularly, and since it's the game where we can easily add more players if anyone's interested, I thought I'd make a dedicated thread - for information on the game, details on how to set up the game, specifics on the upcoming session, tips, recaps, discussion and feedback.

What's all this about Arma, and why should I care?

First of all, for those who don't know Arma, here's some info, straight from Wikipedia:
"ARMA ... is a series of first person tactical military shooters... It features large elements of realism and simulation; a blend of large-scale military conflict spread across large areas alongside the more close quartered battles."

People's first impression of Arma tends to be that it's clunky and unforgiving, with a fiendishly steep learning curve. At the same time, few military shooters offer the scope and the range of gameplay and tactics that Arma does, from regular infantry warfare via search-and-rescue or Close Air Support to large-scale combined operations. It is rather clunky and it isn't as immediately approachable as most shooters, but especially in coop with friends it can be learnt pretty quickly. Also, there's an active community making missions, guides and videos. I can especially recommend Dslyecxi's video guides, all of which can be accessed here.

The following two may be especially pertinent to the TTLG coop sessions:

TTLG goes Arma!

Now, to return to the TTLG coop sessions: for the last few months, we've been running Arma 3 coop sessions every 2-3 weeks on Saturday in the afternoon (UK time). You can find the overall information at our Steam group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/ArmaTTLG

Here's a video of some of our adventures, courtesy of henke:

Who do I have to shoot to join?

What do you actually need to play:

Arma 3. (You don't need any of the DLC, although you might have access to more equipment if you do own it.)

Teamspeak 3 (and a headset or speakers and a mic). We're using this to communicate during the sessions.

A small mod set, which you can download from Steam and which currently includes: CBA_A3, the CUP mods, ShackTac User Interface and Task Force Radio (TFAR). (I recommend subscribing to the versions of the mods listed in my Steam Workshop collection. Some of the mods exist in various versions that aren't always updated or compatible with each other.)

If you are a newcomer and would like to join, why not post in this thread or drop me a PM? The gang is happy to help with questions, and I might be able to help people set things up and test their setup spontaneously.

Please note that there is no requirement to join the entire session; if you can just join for half an hour or an hour, you should still feel free to join. Best to let me know beforehand, though, so I can choose the missions accordingly.

If you'd like to invite friends from outside TTLG, please feel free to do so. The more the merrier. Ideally they shouldn't be too hung up on milsim realism, because we're not exactly the most coordinated bunch.

Finally, when's the next session going to happen? Here's the relevant info - which I'll always try to keep updated:

The next Arma 3 coop session:

Date: Sat, 11 November 2017
Time: 4-6pm UK time

As always, I'll be online a bit before 4pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 15 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.

And that's it for now! I'll keep this post updated with the relevant info. Hoping to see you on Altis, Stratis or Malden!

And on this fine summer day (well, summer for some of us) we had a small but select group of warriors: Malf, Piglick, Sulphur (AKA James Mason) and myself. For some reason - AI updates, mods or the Gods of Arma being fickle bastards? - practically every mission today was a proper meatgrinder, with several of them offering nothing in the way of revive or respawn. Proper, hard-as-nails, old-school Arma. Oh yeah, and Malf hovering in mid-air and Sulphur suddenly finding himself in the middle of a mountain.

After a combat patrol gone wrong in Malden, a stealthy hostage rescue mission that turned into a massacre at the Ghost Hotel (we were the ones being massacred) and us getting picked off one by one on an Altis mountainside, we ended up at the Stratis military airfield for some sheepkilling and PvP. My best moment: crashing a helicopter into Sulphur... who was already dead, killed by Malf or Piglick.

It's been fun, gents, and I'm looking forward to the next session. I'll post an update here and on Steam as soon as I know when it'll be. Thanks for the game!

Quick update: I started tweaking the missions I've got for our sessions to add a revive system, as it sucks if the only options are instadeath or instadeath + respawn. I very much prefer Arma when it finds a balance between realism and playability, and a wounding/revive system helps with this.

The built-in revive system didn't seem to work; I added the required lines of code, but nothing happened. (Thanks to henke and Jeshibu for helping me test this!) However, the fan-made AIS script works and is pretty snazzy: when someone is wounded (I think this goes for all playable characters, whether they're currently being played or not), they go down but don't die. You first stabilise them so they don't bleed to death, then you can drag or carry them away from enemy fire and revive them. I'm curious to try this out in practice. In any case, only about 300 missions to unpack and check whether I need to add the revive system. It sounds like a hassle, and it is one, but it's not as bad as it could be: it's basically just a matter of copying and pasting a few lines of code and copying a directory, and voilą: revivability!

Just finished a marathon session of Arma with henke, Malf, Jeshibu and Sulphur... and Price, the Almost But Not Entirely Useless AI who spent most of the mission sitting in the truck doing Sudokus. The mission, Sigma Quadrant 2, had us take out fuel trucks fleeing to the hills, command posts, and too many armoured vehicles with the wrong kind of rocket launchers and rockets. It's only on the very last tank that I realised a different launcher would not only do more damage but would also not require us to lock on.

While some of the mission was somewhat frustrating - godlike AI aim and sadistic armoured vehicles taking us out every time we were revived will do that - as a whole it was great fun and suitably epic...

... and that's not even mentioning Malf swimming a shark-infested bay to get back to the final tank. And then almost being taken out by us.

Edit: I should've mentioned our greatest enemy: DLC ad popups. I need to find out how to get around these, because it sucks for everyone who's suddenly got adds for Jets DLC plastered across their screens.

I've tested the different launchers, and for situations where we face ground vehicles, the regular Titan launcher isn't good, as it's an anti-air weapon.

The Titan Compact launcher with AT missiles should work, either by using lock-on (but for that the vehicle in question has to be hot; you can switch to heat vision mode by pressing N) or by guiding the missile to where you're aiming at. The latter still does take some practice, though; I might cobble together a quick test scenario that we can launch into next time.

The PCML launcher also works reasonably well, either in dumb-fire mode (if the target isn't hot) or by locking on.

Some parts of yesterday's epic mission would've been easier if we'd known this earlier on, I suspect.

2) DLC pop-ups
It seems that using any of the DLC items in the Virtual Arsenal will result in those who haven't got the DLC getting annoying pop-up ads. In the arsenal, those items should be recognisable, though. If you check out the screenshot at https://tinyurl.com/ycmouuh8, you'll see that some items have a symbol next to them; these symbols represent the different DLCs, e.g. the LIM-85 5.56 mm is part of the Apex DLC, while the various MAR-10 variants are from the Marksmen DLC. Note that if there's a Virtual Ammobox option in a mission, that one doesn't show the DLC icons, so it's best to do things from the Virtual Arsenal. I'm sorry, Jesh, it's likely that your favourite hat is one of the DLC items.

Nice! By the way, it seems that it may have been my own edits (i.e. adding the wounding/revive system) that killed the option to respawn at the truck. Oops... However, I've since found out how I can add that back in again in a fairly simple way. Plenty more Sigma Quadrants, so I will have a few more chances to repair or add something to the mission and break something else in the process.

99 little bugs in the code. 99 little bugs in the code. Take one down, patch it around, 117 little bugs in the code.

Well I guess you gave the Cliff's Notes version.

I had bought and installed Arma3 last month just to do this with you guys, and less than a week later my gaming laptop fries. Really frustrating. Might be months until I can get it repaired. Knock on wood I'll join in eventually.

Oh man, that sucks! Fingers crossed you'll manage to get it repaired sooner. Arma is definitely one of those games that improves in many ways when there are more players. You can counter some of its jankiness with strategy (flanking manoeuvres greatly benefit from having enough people), and you get missions that offer hugely different roles (e.g. fireteam on the ground, two people in a helicopter providing Close Air Support).

We got started with a small-scale adversarial: 3v3 (with one of the slots taken up by AI). The mission (which I put together) could use some work, e.g. a minefield around the village where each team was trying to kill the other, but it was still fun, with a tense stand-off between Malf and Jesh at the end. Malf won, aided by the force ghosts of Sulphur and PigLick.

The second mission turned out to be a bit broken; we were tasked with blowing up some tanks and jet prototypes, but even three explosive charges didn't make a dent in either tank. Also, anyone who died respawned a couple of kilometres away. Some good moments, especially once we got to the airfield (Jesh did a great stealth kill on a guard), but too broken to play again.

After sadly losing PigLick to the borked mission, we ended with one that had the four of us attacking a hotel and trying to rescue a hostage. After a false start, we did get to the hostage after a tense nighttime firefight, but he was already dead. Luckily, though, we found an APC in the hotel's backyard and drove to freedom. Okay, more accurately, we drove into the nearest wall, but the game still counted that as a win. Success!

Anyway, currently the plan is to return to Arma in two weeks' time:

The next Arma 3 coop session:

Date: Sat, 23 September 2017
Time: 4-6pm UK time

As always, I'll be online a bit before 4pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 15 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.

If stealing the caps of dead hostages is wrong, I don't want to be right.

On a different note: I've got a couple of missions that allow one or two players to hop in a Hummingbird helicopter and provide Close Air Support and/or transport. I'm always happy to pilot a chopper in Arma (though I've not yet done it in MP) myself, but are any of the regulars confident enough when it comes to Arma heliscapades? (In other words: if you enjoy the helicopters in the game but aren't entirely confident piloting them, some practice may be advisable. )

We had five people joining for today's Arma session: TTLG regulars Jeshibu, Malf, Sulphur and myself, and Lord Penney, who brings much needed Arma experience to the table.

Not that this helped much... We started with a quickish adversarial I'd put together; we already played it last time round, but this time I added a helicopter and a minefield around the village to add a way of winning (escape in the helicopter) and to make sure that people don't wander off to a different corner of Altis, open a corner shop, fall in love with the beautiful daughter of the owner of the corner shop and raise a family. However, Lord Penney had the clever idea of using the helicopter as a decoy, sending an AI to fly off... and crash. Which meant that the game still ended with a drawn out 1v1.

Then came a mission of Lord Penney's, first led by me, which meant that we pulled an Admiral Ozzel: taking our truck too close to the village we were supposed to clear. We were wiped out pretty quickly, after which we restarted under Jesh's command. He was smarter about it - but what can you do against several dozen of Arma's Finest?

After we got wiped out again, we tried a mission I'd been putting together. I won't say too much about the mission itself, but I will say that I may have overdone it with the patrols... Malf's cries of "I just walked past a window and got shot!" still ring in my ears. Malf took an aerial shot of the place to show how outmanned our last survivor Lord Penney was. On the plus side: the game didn't actually slow down much!

On to Defend Kamino, which I thought might be, well, if not easier then at least fairer. I stopped thinking that when the game, which had equipped us with rifles, started attacking us with armoured vehicles. There we were without any AT weaponry... I guess we could've placed mines and other explosives, but if we don't know what will attack us and from where, it does become a bit difficult. And I swear that our artillery used us for target practice as well...

So we quit that one and finished on a mission where we had to clear Alikampos, the site of that first adversarial we'd played. It was still tough, but it was as if Arma had suddenly decided to play fair. What helped was that Lord Penney took the lead, and it shows that he has many, many years of Arma experience. We didn't get through Alikampos unscathed, losing Sulphur along the way, but we did finish on a victory. Yay!

Next Arma session will be in three weeks' time (i.e. 14 October). Hoping to see some of the others there as well!

Actually, ignore that last bit: as I won't be around on 14 October, the next session will be a week earlier:

The next Arma 3 coop session:

Date: Sat, 7 October 2017
Time: 4-6pm UK time

As always, I'll be online a bit before 4pm to set up the server and check who's on Steam. I'll try to launch the server with a lobby mission 15 minutes before the session starts, and I'll post the IP and password on the Steam group, under the Events tab.

I hope that's okay for everyone and we'll all have recovered from the meat grinder by then. As always, I'll send around reminders on Steam.

Thanks to henke, Malf and Lord Penney for today's mission - Sulphur was also going to join but didn't manage due to power outages.

The mission - one we'd previously played but not finished - was tough but fun. The easiest part was rescuing a civilian hostage who wasn't really held captive anyway, because as we approached the hut where they were keeping him he just ran off into the woods. Next we blew up some... antennas? antennae? Anyway, this time we actually brough some explosives along, which helped. We then tried to be smart and sneak up on the town where we were supposed to blow up a helicopter by running up a wooded hill... which is where the whole goddamn CSAT army decided to descend on us, pinning us down in a graveyard, of all places. Once we did make it to the town, we soon found ourselves facing two MRAPs - or, as I like to call them, armoured bastards. Henke took care of one of them and Lord Penney, in a heroic display of fuckthisshittery, blew up the other one with an explosive charge. The helicopter soon met the same fate, so our last task was to take an airfield and secure it against the counterstrike.

Which would've been a lot easier if we'd realised that there was an ammo box right next to the hangar where we could rearm, because we found ourselves dying, respawning miles away, grabbing some anti-tank weaponry, getting back to the airfield, firing a shot, dying, respawning, etc. etc. In the end the game didn't even have the decency to trigger the ending, because there sure as hell weren't any tanks, attack boats or infantry left on that airfield, other than us.

So we decided to end this glorious, gory epic with a duel: henke against myself. I won, though only after shooting Malf who was acting as the ref, so perhaps I actually got disqualified.

Anyway, here's what was left of the hangar after we blew up the helicopter inside it. Picturesque, no?